I’ve taught kids to shoot pistols since the 90’s in both 4H and Scholastic Steel Pistol. I’ve taught Boy Scouts and adult never-shot-before women’s classes. I’ve taught classes of teacher-wanna-bees how to teach. I’ve been to a number of coaching clinics. I’ve seen the transition from pistol teaching being dominated by bullseye experts to the soaring popularity of action games, and experts from that field starting to dominate. I coached a teen steel team for a few years. I’ve made a lot of teenagers able to shoot better than I can with my old eyes. Here is my advice for starting a newcomer. I’d be happy to have others add their advice or question mine.
Start on a rest. Sitting if possible. Use a high enough support to avoid contortions. Laying down on a bench to get your eye aligned with the sights strains the neck and makes you use the very top of your glasses – not the right part of the lens.
Sight alignment, sight alignment, sight alignment. Trigger control. Don’t worry about breath control for several months. Teach a reasonable stance and foot position but then forget about it for a while, unless some kid has a seriously unstable platform. Beginners cannot absorb a ten-item checklist. Major on the majors, let the minor issues wait. No one wants to be told that everything must be perfect before every shot.
Teach them to focus on the front sight blade. This is hard, the target tries to grab their attention. The front sight should be sharp and the target fuzzy. If you use a standard bench as a support (too low!) you will lean waaaay forward and then tilt your head up to see the sights. It is impossible to do this and focus on the front sight! Use a higher rest.
Fix bad grip when you see it but don’t spend ten minutes a night on grip. Obviously you must teach the new shooter to keep their fingers and thumbs out of the way of the slide, and far from the muzzle, and reasonably distant from the cylinder gap on a revolver. Those are all safety, I am talking about teaching accuracy here. 99% of grip problems related to accuracy are caused by grabbing the pistol too low.
Keep that stupid shot analysis picture away from them. It was developed by one-handed bullseye shooters. It makes sense if you shoot a one-inch group and notice an occasional flyer. If that occasional flyer is always in the same area then this picture can help you analyze what you are doing wrong. If you are shooting two handed at a target and trying to turn a five inch group into a three inch group it is meaningless. If the group is round but too large then you are doing everything equally right/wrong and you just need more practice.
Don’t mess with sight adjustment. Make sure beforehand that the guns are reasonably sighted in. Never tell a first time shooter that the sights may be off. They often will shoot a group that is low but then shoot another group that is high, or left. Their grip and sight picture have not yet stabilized. Their groups will wander. Don’t get them fixated on the machine as the panacea for their bad habits. This is why I prefer steel targets over paper. It is fine to tell someone shooting a steel target “all your misses are low” but teaching Kentucky Windage on a paper target is teaching bad habits. Missing high is usually caused by ignoring the rear sight and putting the front sight blade right on target. The rear sight is then too low. Sight alignment! Missing low is usually caused by pulling the muzzle low before the trigger breaks.
Long double action or striker fired guns can be subject to these low shots. Obviously recoil anticipation can do this, as we try to hold the gun down against recoil we push it down during the trigger press. Teach them to turn that impulse off. Dry firing helps control this. They can learn to stop anticipating recoil. They can learn to turn other impulses off as well. This is a life lesson.
But just the long pull on the trigger can cause shots to break low. Historically we taught kids to start out single action, get the sights aligned perfectly, and then press the trigger without messing up that perfect alignment. I was nearly sixty when I heard a speaker state it differently – “The sights come into alignment as the hammer falls.” I practiced this religiously, every day for several weeks. After 40 years of shooting my double action groups got noticeably tighter. And higher! I had learned to keep the sights aligned as my trigger finger moved through that long arc. Dry firing I could see the sights aligned as the hammer fell. Live firing got noticeably better. This is not milking the trigger or pulling the double action until it is about to break and then pausing. It is incorporating the sight alignment process into the entire step of trigger press. Rather than “Align gun-hold perfectly still-Press trigger” it is two simultaneous acts. Like rubbing your head and patting your stomach, or picking a guitar with one hand while fretting with the other. Try it with snap caps for two or three weeks, ten or twelve shots a day. Watch the sights. Really watch them. Start slowly and then build speed. It really works!
Sight alignment. Did I mention that? We’ll come back to it.
Once the kids (or adult beginners) can keep ten shots on a target from a rest let them stand. Once they can keep eight out of ten (without a rest) on the target you can start working hard on stance and grip. Their sight alignment is now reasonable.
Now is the time to demand perfect foot placement and grip. Tell them that you cannot buy them a $2,500 gun but you can give them the same grip and stance as an Olympic champion. Getting your feet correct is easy. Making it a habit is hard. The correct habit is to take a proper stance and then DON”T MOVE YOUR FEET! (Yelling is intentional.) It continually shocks me how much teenagers unconsciously move their feet. Grip is the same. A perfect grip is easy and I can show you how to do it in 23 seconds. Developing a habit of taking that perfect grip is hard. Every time they pick up a gun they must put it into their dominant hand perfectly. At the line, in the classroom, at the gun store. Perfect. Pick it up with the support hand and place it perfectly into the strong hand.
Sight alignment. (And you, at Position 4, get your feet back where they belong!)
Once they can reliably hit a target start fast double taps, preferably on steel. If you use a paper target start with a clean target and have them shoot two, then inspect the target with binoculars or by getting close to it. Emphasize that the sights must come back into alignment before the second, controlled, trigger squeeze. In my experience fast follow up shots (double taps, not five shots in a row) teach good first shot discipline. Some will make this transition easily. Some will forget the sights and pull the trigger before they are back into alignment and on target. Slow those people down. Shooting faster is a privilege to be earned. Shooting five shots rapid fire is more problematic. Students go faster and faster and almost certainly lose their concentration on sight alignment as they speed up. Stay with two shots for a while. The next step, if you have the right facility, is transitioning targets. Five shots on five different (easy) targets is fun, if you demand that the student goes slow enough to align the sights on each target. If you let them go too fast it is not fun. Actually emptying the gun too fast really is fun the first time, but it becomes frustrating if you actually want to hit the target…
Bullseye shooting is a game of precision, discipline and obsessive attention to detail. You shoot ten shots and (with a 22) cannot tell how well you did until everyone is done and you pull targets. The World War II and Korean generations loved bullseye shooting. I watched kids get impatient and bored with the ten point pre-shot checklist and a 3 inch group that only scored 80 out of 100. Today’s kids are more interested in five fast shots on steel, with a “clang” telling them that they hit (or no clang telling them that they missed). I think today’s adults are pretty similar. I taught 100 women a few weeks ago. I had absolute newcomers double tapping a 12” plate. They loved it. Getting them to shoot a 100 on a bullseye target would take years, and maybe one of those 100 women have the time to devote to that goal. I have great respect for people who can shoot a 100 point target off hand. Heck I have great respect for people who can average 80 in a club match. But newcomers are not there and don’t need to be there. There is a place for virtuoso violinists. But there are probably 10.000 times as many decent guitarists as there are concert violists. Make shooting fun and make the goals attainable. I taught one young lady who ended up on her college pistol team. That is one out of more than 1000 people that I have taught. I’m glad for her but I do not try to turn everyone into her.
Striker fired 9mm and their 22-caliber look a likes are easier to shoot double action than revolvers. 10,000 local and state police forces learned that. Don’t fight the facts. New shooters will do better with plastic semi’s than with revolvers. I had our steel team shoot practice matches with plastic guns and with revolvers. Scores got worse. The transition to revolver was far worse for the girls than for the boys. By that I mean individual kids all got worse and the girls deteriorated more than the boys did. I’m not including reload time, I mean that a kid who shoots at a target with a revolver is more likely to miss and shoots slower while he/she is missing more. I suspect hand size and strength was why the revolvers hurt the female scores more. None of that is to say girls cannot shoot, the top shooters in our 4H club are often girls. Start new shooters on semi’s.
Caliber – I worked in an international business and took literally hundreds of foreigners shooting for the first time. People heard that I took someone shooting and then when they came to America they always wanted to know if I would take them shooting. Of course I did! I also teach “sampler” sessions to Americans – kids and adults – where I have an hour or so but I know they will never probably come back. They all want to go home saying that they shot something big. I have taken a brand new shooter from 22’s to 38’s or 9mm to 357’s to a 44 magnum in an hour. They can do it if you go slowly and explain each step. It is a thrill for someone to go home to Chile or Italy or wherever and say, “I shot a 44 magnum!” No one ever got hurt. A few decided to stop after the 357 magnum. That was 100% fine and they were always encouraged to stop when they wanted to. It is not about my ego it is about them having a great time.
9mm and 22 are the rounds of choice for training and you will save a lot of money if you stick with them. The big stuff is just for fun. Winston Churchill said, “I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.” I would make them all learn 9mm or 38 Special, but I would let the clever ones learn 357 as an honor, and 44 magnum as a treat. Still it is no treat if you are not prepared.
Patience – the teacher’s patience – is vital. In youth organizations we often try not to teach our own kids. Rather we let our friends teach them. It is much easier for me to be patient with your son or daughter than with my own. I can be patient with my own kids, but it is a learned response, like trying not to anticipate recoil. I have to turn off my natural impulses! Be aware of fatigue – when the shooter gets fatigued their form breaks down and success becomes harder to attain. When the teacher gets fatigued patience breaks down and advice becomes criticism. Take a break!
And remind them that the sights need to be aligned.
Start on a rest. Sitting if possible. Use a high enough support to avoid contortions. Laying down on a bench to get your eye aligned with the sights strains the neck and makes you use the very top of your glasses – not the right part of the lens.
Sight alignment, sight alignment, sight alignment. Trigger control. Don’t worry about breath control for several months. Teach a reasonable stance and foot position but then forget about it for a while, unless some kid has a seriously unstable platform. Beginners cannot absorb a ten-item checklist. Major on the majors, let the minor issues wait. No one wants to be told that everything must be perfect before every shot.
Teach them to focus on the front sight blade. This is hard, the target tries to grab their attention. The front sight should be sharp and the target fuzzy. If you use a standard bench as a support (too low!) you will lean waaaay forward and then tilt your head up to see the sights. It is impossible to do this and focus on the front sight! Use a higher rest.
Fix bad grip when you see it but don’t spend ten minutes a night on grip. Obviously you must teach the new shooter to keep their fingers and thumbs out of the way of the slide, and far from the muzzle, and reasonably distant from the cylinder gap on a revolver. Those are all safety, I am talking about teaching accuracy here. 99% of grip problems related to accuracy are caused by grabbing the pistol too low.
Keep that stupid shot analysis picture away from them. It was developed by one-handed bullseye shooters. It makes sense if you shoot a one-inch group and notice an occasional flyer. If that occasional flyer is always in the same area then this picture can help you analyze what you are doing wrong. If you are shooting two handed at a target and trying to turn a five inch group into a three inch group it is meaningless. If the group is round but too large then you are doing everything equally right/wrong and you just need more practice.
Don’t mess with sight adjustment. Make sure beforehand that the guns are reasonably sighted in. Never tell a first time shooter that the sights may be off. They often will shoot a group that is low but then shoot another group that is high, or left. Their grip and sight picture have not yet stabilized. Their groups will wander. Don’t get them fixated on the machine as the panacea for their bad habits. This is why I prefer steel targets over paper. It is fine to tell someone shooting a steel target “all your misses are low” but teaching Kentucky Windage on a paper target is teaching bad habits. Missing high is usually caused by ignoring the rear sight and putting the front sight blade right on target. The rear sight is then too low. Sight alignment! Missing low is usually caused by pulling the muzzle low before the trigger breaks.
Long double action or striker fired guns can be subject to these low shots. Obviously recoil anticipation can do this, as we try to hold the gun down against recoil we push it down during the trigger press. Teach them to turn that impulse off. Dry firing helps control this. They can learn to stop anticipating recoil. They can learn to turn other impulses off as well. This is a life lesson.
But just the long pull on the trigger can cause shots to break low. Historically we taught kids to start out single action, get the sights aligned perfectly, and then press the trigger without messing up that perfect alignment. I was nearly sixty when I heard a speaker state it differently – “The sights come into alignment as the hammer falls.” I practiced this religiously, every day for several weeks. After 40 years of shooting my double action groups got noticeably tighter. And higher! I had learned to keep the sights aligned as my trigger finger moved through that long arc. Dry firing I could see the sights aligned as the hammer fell. Live firing got noticeably better. This is not milking the trigger or pulling the double action until it is about to break and then pausing. It is incorporating the sight alignment process into the entire step of trigger press. Rather than “Align gun-hold perfectly still-Press trigger” it is two simultaneous acts. Like rubbing your head and patting your stomach, or picking a guitar with one hand while fretting with the other. Try it with snap caps for two or three weeks, ten or twelve shots a day. Watch the sights. Really watch them. Start slowly and then build speed. It really works!
Sight alignment. Did I mention that? We’ll come back to it.
Once the kids (or adult beginners) can keep ten shots on a target from a rest let them stand. Once they can keep eight out of ten (without a rest) on the target you can start working hard on stance and grip. Their sight alignment is now reasonable.
Now is the time to demand perfect foot placement and grip. Tell them that you cannot buy them a $2,500 gun but you can give them the same grip and stance as an Olympic champion. Getting your feet correct is easy. Making it a habit is hard. The correct habit is to take a proper stance and then DON”T MOVE YOUR FEET! (Yelling is intentional.) It continually shocks me how much teenagers unconsciously move their feet. Grip is the same. A perfect grip is easy and I can show you how to do it in 23 seconds. Developing a habit of taking that perfect grip is hard. Every time they pick up a gun they must put it into their dominant hand perfectly. At the line, in the classroom, at the gun store. Perfect. Pick it up with the support hand and place it perfectly into the strong hand.
Sight alignment. (And you, at Position 4, get your feet back where they belong!)
Once they can reliably hit a target start fast double taps, preferably on steel. If you use a paper target start with a clean target and have them shoot two, then inspect the target with binoculars or by getting close to it. Emphasize that the sights must come back into alignment before the second, controlled, trigger squeeze. In my experience fast follow up shots (double taps, not five shots in a row) teach good first shot discipline. Some will make this transition easily. Some will forget the sights and pull the trigger before they are back into alignment and on target. Slow those people down. Shooting faster is a privilege to be earned. Shooting five shots rapid fire is more problematic. Students go faster and faster and almost certainly lose their concentration on sight alignment as they speed up. Stay with two shots for a while. The next step, if you have the right facility, is transitioning targets. Five shots on five different (easy) targets is fun, if you demand that the student goes slow enough to align the sights on each target. If you let them go too fast it is not fun. Actually emptying the gun too fast really is fun the first time, but it becomes frustrating if you actually want to hit the target…
Bullseye shooting is a game of precision, discipline and obsessive attention to detail. You shoot ten shots and (with a 22) cannot tell how well you did until everyone is done and you pull targets. The World War II and Korean generations loved bullseye shooting. I watched kids get impatient and bored with the ten point pre-shot checklist and a 3 inch group that only scored 80 out of 100. Today’s kids are more interested in five fast shots on steel, with a “clang” telling them that they hit (or no clang telling them that they missed). I think today’s adults are pretty similar. I taught 100 women a few weeks ago. I had absolute newcomers double tapping a 12” plate. They loved it. Getting them to shoot a 100 on a bullseye target would take years, and maybe one of those 100 women have the time to devote to that goal. I have great respect for people who can shoot a 100 point target off hand. Heck I have great respect for people who can average 80 in a club match. But newcomers are not there and don’t need to be there. There is a place for virtuoso violinists. But there are probably 10.000 times as many decent guitarists as there are concert violists. Make shooting fun and make the goals attainable. I taught one young lady who ended up on her college pistol team. That is one out of more than 1000 people that I have taught. I’m glad for her but I do not try to turn everyone into her.
Striker fired 9mm and their 22-caliber look a likes are easier to shoot double action than revolvers. 10,000 local and state police forces learned that. Don’t fight the facts. New shooters will do better with plastic semi’s than with revolvers. I had our steel team shoot practice matches with plastic guns and with revolvers. Scores got worse. The transition to revolver was far worse for the girls than for the boys. By that I mean individual kids all got worse and the girls deteriorated more than the boys did. I’m not including reload time, I mean that a kid who shoots at a target with a revolver is more likely to miss and shoots slower while he/she is missing more. I suspect hand size and strength was why the revolvers hurt the female scores more. None of that is to say girls cannot shoot, the top shooters in our 4H club are often girls. Start new shooters on semi’s.
Caliber – I worked in an international business and took literally hundreds of foreigners shooting for the first time. People heard that I took someone shooting and then when they came to America they always wanted to know if I would take them shooting. Of course I did! I also teach “sampler” sessions to Americans – kids and adults – where I have an hour or so but I know they will never probably come back. They all want to go home saying that they shot something big. I have taken a brand new shooter from 22’s to 38’s or 9mm to 357’s to a 44 magnum in an hour. They can do it if you go slowly and explain each step. It is a thrill for someone to go home to Chile or Italy or wherever and say, “I shot a 44 magnum!” No one ever got hurt. A few decided to stop after the 357 magnum. That was 100% fine and they were always encouraged to stop when they wanted to. It is not about my ego it is about them having a great time.
9mm and 22 are the rounds of choice for training and you will save a lot of money if you stick with them. The big stuff is just for fun. Winston Churchill said, “I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.” I would make them all learn 9mm or 38 Special, but I would let the clever ones learn 357 as an honor, and 44 magnum as a treat. Still it is no treat if you are not prepared.
Patience – the teacher’s patience – is vital. In youth organizations we often try not to teach our own kids. Rather we let our friends teach them. It is much easier for me to be patient with your son or daughter than with my own. I can be patient with my own kids, but it is a learned response, like trying not to anticipate recoil. I have to turn off my natural impulses! Be aware of fatigue – when the shooter gets fatigued their form breaks down and success becomes harder to attain. When the teacher gets fatigued patience breaks down and advice becomes criticism. Take a break!
And remind them that the sights need to be aligned.
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